Title: Walk on Earth a StrangerAuthor: Rae CarsonRating: 5 Stars (This may be the first ti8me I’ve ever given a 5 star rating, but six months after initially reading this book I still love it more than anything I can imagine!)Genre: YA FantasyPublisher: GreenwillowPublication Date: September 22nd 2015How Did I Get This Book: Bought / AudibleFormat: Hardcover / AudiobookWhy Did I Read This Book: This book seemed so different and unique and I fell in love with the premise. Review Written By:Lisa Golding | City of YA Books

Synopsis

Gold is in my blood, in my breath, even in the flecks in my eyes.

Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend—who might want to be something more.

She also has a secret.

Lee can sense gold in the world around her. Veins deep in the earth. Small nuggets in a stream. Even gold dust caught underneath a fingernail. She has kept her family safe and able to buy provisions, even through the harshest winters. But what would someone do to control a girl with that kind of power? A person might murder for it.

When everything Lee holds dear is ripped away, she flees west to California—where gold has just been discovered. Perhaps this will be the one place a magical girl can be herself. If she survives the journey.

The acclaimed Rae Carson begins a sweeping new trilogy set in Gold Rush-era America, about a young woman with a powerful and dangerous gift.

Review

Reviewing books you truly love can be hard, but I may as well give this a go!

I discovered this book and fell in love with the idea of a girl who can sense gold at a time like the california gold rush of the 1840's. The premise just hooked me, so I purchased the hardback edition online. Once the book arrived I fell ill, I don’t mean the sniffles kind of ill, I mean I couldn’t walk or leave my bed ill. So I decided to get this book on Audible, and listen to it while I was in bed or in the bath. That was probably one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. ​

This book just made me feel happy, it gave me a sense of warmth that I just find hard to put fully into words. The narrator is a southern voice which to me is soothing, seeing as a lot of my family actually lives in the south of America while I’m all lonely over here in the UK.

The book is beautifully written, it’s simplistic in a way. There is no overly convoluted plot. It’s a story about travelling across a country in the 1800s with the usual events. There are some complications due to the main characters paranormal ability but it just worked out perfectly.

This book is diverse, but not for diversity’s sake. I am all for diversity in book, but at times I feel that a gay character has been crowbarred in simply so the author can defend themselves and say that their book is diverse.

We meet characters in this book who we fall in love with, and later on you learn that they are gay. That’s not their defining feature though and I love that, these were established and loved characters before we learnt of their sexual orientation and I honestly think that right there is diversity done right. Even in the 1800’s, a time when diversity really wasn’t a thing, Carson creates a wonderfully diverse world and even comments multiple times upon slavery in the book, seeing as several states still used slaves at this time, yet some were strongly for the abolition of slavery.

This book just feels shockingly real. Periods are mentioned, not shirked away from. The main character is a girl traveling as a boy trying to hide who she is, so naturally periods would be an issue! Most authors would shy away from this topic, but Carson does an amazing job at including it all in.

The romance is a slow burn, and not the priority of this book. This book is simply perfection and I’m so happy I’ve read it. I would highly recommend it to anyone else!

Final thoughts

​Beautiful and poetic, gritty and real. This book is simply perfection.